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Curious about your favorite
celebrity’s date of birth? Do your research ASAP: a new law signed in September
by California Governor Jerry Brown gives actors the power to demand that
entertainment websites like the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) remove
information about their ages. The law—which becomes effective January 1,
2017—is intended to protect against age discrimination in Hollywood. And yes,
free-speech advocates are up in arms.
The law grants sites five days
to comply with a request after a paying member asks that their age be removed.
In response, IMDb filed suit in U.S.
District Court against California’s Attorney General (and
soon-to-be U.S. senator) Kamala Harris in an effort to overturn the new law.
A $1 million lawsuit filed in 2013 by actress
Huong Hoang, known professionally as Junie Hoang, gave rise to the new law, and
indeed the entire online-age debate. Hoang asserted that IMDb’s refusal to
remove her date of birth branded her as “over the hill” and caused her the loss
of film roles. A Seattle jury ruled in favor of IMDb, which led to the
opposition lobbying for the California law, now about to take effect. Or not.
In this corner…
The Screen Actors Guild
(SAG-AFTRA) had loudly lobbied for the bill, telling its members in an open letter that “Age discrimination
is a major problem in our industry, and it must be addressed.” The Guild, which
represents more than 116,000 active members, asserts that publishing
performers’ dates of birth can cause “career damage.”
SAG-AFTRA’s union president
Gabrielle Carteris (who famously lied about her age to secure a role as a
teenage cast member of Beverly Hills 90210) argued in an August
op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter that if electronic
databases had been omnipresent in 1990, when she auditioned for the role, she
would never have been cast.
“My role on Beverly
Hills, 90210 could not have happened for me today, plain and simple,”
Carteris wrote. “I would never have been called to audition for the part of
16-year-old Andrea Zuckerman if they had known I was 29. Electronic casting
sites did not exist in 1990; today, they are prevalent and influential. And
they affect casting decisions even when casting personnel don’t recognize their
unconscious bias.”
And in the other
corner…
Debates over the law hinge on
whether or not age is fodder for the public domain, and the wider implications
on censorship generally. While the bill specifically restricts its coverage to
sites that provide employment-related services on a subscription basis (e.g., IMDb Pro and StudioSystem), First Amendment activists
contend that its effects could be broader.
Michael Beckerman, president
and CEO of the Washington D.C.-based lobbying group the Internet Association,
spoke out against age discrimination in Hollywood in his own Hollywood
Reporter op-ed while arguing that “the law would seriously
undermine some of our most fundamental rights, while doing nothing to eliminate
discrimination in casting.”
Beckerman deemed arguments
like Carteris’s “problematic” for multiple reasons: “Requiring the removal of
factually accurate age information across websites suppresses free speech. This
is not a question of preventing salacious rumors; rather it is about the right
to present basic facts that live in the public domain. Displaying such
information isn’t a form of discrimination, and internet companies should not
be punished for how people use public data.
“In addition to these
immediate harms, permitting unconstitutional limitations on free speech—even in
the pursuit of similarly noble intentions—opens up a Pandora’s box for more
harmful consequences in the future. Currently, the law would target entertainment
sites such as IMDb from posting age information about actors. But consider
this: If the goal is to prevent discrimination by limiting information, should
lawmakers force redactions from any website, even Wikipedia?”
Peter Scheer, executive
director of the First Amendment Coalition, says it’s possible his
organization could sue to block the law’s implementation. As Scheer
recently told the LA Weekly,“You can’t take out of circulation true
facts because you don’t like the true facts. IMDb is being forced by the
government to censor itself.”
“We would love to challenge
this law,” Scheer added. “It was done with good intentions, but I’m sure that
it’s unconstitutional.”
Now shake hands
and come out fighting
In its own filing, IMDb contends that the state has
“chosen to chill free speech and undermine public access to factual
information,” arguing that not only has the site been unfairly targeted, but
that the law itself does nothing to address the sources of age discrimination.
“Prejudice and bias, not
truthful information, are the root causes of discrimination,” the lawsuit says.
“This law unfairly targets IMDb.com (which appears to be the only public
site impacted by the law) and forces IMDb to suppress factual information from
public view. Moreover, the factual information being suppressed from IMDb is
available from many other sources.”
We’ll soon see if that
argument is enough to turn back the new law, but age discrimination in the
workplace is a problem everybody
deals with, and isn’t going away anytime soon.
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